Girls’ education is as a viable climate strategy alongside more technical solutions like offshore wind turbines and electric cars

1. Promote girls’ reproductive rights in order to ensure equitable climate action. The first platform is centered on enhancing girls’ and women’s reproductive health and rights, an argument that pushes current discussions on “female education,” women’s fertility, and population growth to consider how the underlying lever of change is education’s impact on girls’ and women’s control over their reproductive lives. Making the connection to female rights and agency has important implications not only for providing girls and women the opportunities to develop their own human, social, and political capital, but also for ensuring more equitable climate action.

2. Invest in girls’ education in order to foster climate participation and leadership. The second platform draws attention to the role that women in leadership and decisionmaking have in increasing the diversity of experiences and perspectives shaping climate change problem identification and policy solutions. This case points to the critical importance of education, both in formal and informal spaces, in setting girls up to take on leadership roles later in life.

3. Develop girls’ life skills for a green economy. The third platform focuses on increasing girls’ and women’s skills for a green economy, and how an investment in girls’ quality education—one that builds the breadth of skills needed not only for a changing world but also for transforming a girl’s world—can be the key to ensuring that girls and women fully participate in sustainable development and have equal opportunity to drive and benefit from greener innovations in the 21st century.